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Rebel Rebel: Fashion’s Fixation on Multiple Piercings and Tattoos

Piercings are in. By now everyone’s familiar with **Rooney Mara’**s hard-core heroine in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, who inspired hoards of aesthetes to reconsider pierced eyebrows and lips. But also take into account the bold, ornate septum rings adorning the models at the Givenchy Haute Couture presentation in Paris last week, and the fine chains linking nose to ear in Chanel’s pre-fall collection. The once-gritty look now appears non-threatening and completely chic—like a rebellion against rebelliousness. “It’s crazy how delicate and beautiful things have gotten,” says piercing artist J. Colby Smith, who has worked on celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and Zoë Kravitz, and recently tended to Vogue staffers Chioma Nnadi, Esther Adams, and yours truly at NY Adorned in the East Village.

Photo: Courtesy of Givenchy (left); Courtesy of Chanel

Having experimented with all types of singular statement earrings, from bejeweled climbers to stunning danglers, we wanted to forge into new territory—namely multiples and upper lobes. Luckily, Smith is an expert at creating a look that compliments the wearer’s ear shape (who would have thought there were body types AND ear types?) and personal taste, even designing pretty custom pieces. Into the Gloss’s Emily Weiss was one of the first on the fashion circuit to entrust her ears to Smith, and she marched us to his studio, cheerily offering advice for braving the process. “The whole ’90s comeback over the past few seasons has been a huge part of it,” Weiss says, noting that she first observed the trend when she photographed a freshly pierced Vanessa Traina for her blog. “She had just gotten a new forward helix piercing [the top inside part of the ear] in San Francisco. It was the first time I’d seen a piercing like that, especially on someone so chic.” Pastry chef Arden Wohl has also been feeling the look and decided to resurrect the cartilage piercings she got in high school (five in her left ear, two in her right) by wearing decidedly grown-up gold Bulgari chains, lighter and prettier than the industrial-looking jewelry that was popular during the Nirvana era.

In the end, the Vogue piercing tally was as follows: Nnadi: 2, Adams: 1, Bernard: 2—ears only. Nnadi, who got two gold studs in the ridge on the inside of her ear (Smith’s suggestion), feels it’s no coincidence that you can find facial piercings on the runways this season: “Rebellion and protest are in the news, so it feels very right for now,” she says. “Added personal decoration is a nice counterpoint to the mid-century modern look that is so popular—it feels subversive yet looks lovely.” Leaving NY Adorned to purchase Dr. Bronner’s Organic Baby Mild soap (Smith’s favorite for caring for new piercings), we could feel the pulse of girl-crew toughness running through us—though it may have been our throbbing earlobes.

And just when we thought our itch for the alternative had subsided, we learned that calligrapher Bernard Maisner, known for his lovely wedding invitations (as seen in mailboxes across the Upper East Side) had been drawing up designs for tattoos. Again, it’s not totally surprising that ink can be elegant if you look at Narciso Rodriguez’s Spring 2012 show, which was inspired by the work of Korean artist **Kim Joon’**s painted ceramic body sculptures, and if you recall the models in John Paul Gaultier’s show the same season, walking down the runway with temporary tattoos. Not to mention that Marc Jacobs continually adds to his personal collection of body art, and just two years ago Vogue admired the inked ivy Miki Zanini (sister to Rochas designer Marco) has on her earlobe. We had to see Maisner’s take. He agreed to show us and came to the office, brushes in hand, to artfully monogram the arm of _Vogue’_s Molly Kennedy. Once on, the temporary ink appeared balanced yet abstract, with fine lines curving around the letters. “Whether it’s a wedding invitation or a tattoo, you have to think about how the letters will look in their final location, and I find the beauty of the translation exciting,” Maisner says, “Doing calligraphy for the body brings in the location aspect. It feels like the old days in art, when pieces were commissioned for a particular architectural space.” Of course, Kennedy’s arm-art was by no means for keeps, but Maisner permanently changed our impression of tattoos. Though previously only conceivable in tiny, hidden form, Kennedy’s prominent ink seemed endlessly tasteful, reigniting the Lisbeth Salander in all of us.